In the fall of 2005, editors for the Windows network of sites from TechTarget -- SearchWinIT.com, SearchExchange.com, SearchWindowsSecurity.com, SearchWinSystems.com and SearchSQLServer.com -- invited companies in the Windows market to nominate their products for the 2005 Products of the Year awards. To be eligible for consideration, a product had to have been introduced or significantly upgraded between Sept. 30, 2004 and Oct. 1, 2005. For previously available products, the upgrade must have incorporated major new features that were designed to meet new or evolving needs in the marketplace.

We looked at products in 14 categories -- Active Directory, antispyware, blade servers, desktop management, general database utilities, Group Policy management, messaging archiving and compliance, messaging backup and recovery, messaging security, patch management, storage hardware, storage management software, systems management, and testing and auditing. Each category had its own set of judges, who rated the products in six categories -- innovation, performance, ease of integration into environment, ease of use and manageability, functionality, value, and service and support. We then tallied the judges ratings separately, and aggregated them with those of the other judges to come up with a single numerical score.